A raw engagement with the land - David Milne, Dulwich Picture Gallery, review

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Sometimes it’s the most unlikely people who produce the most surprising art. Hearing of an exhibition about a little-known Canadian painter, working in remote parts of upstate New York and northern Ontario a hundred years ago you might conclude that David Milne: Modern Painting was a show you could comfortably miss.

How wrong you’d be. The third and last in a series of exhibitions at Dulwich Picture Gallery on early 20th century Canadian painters (following on from the Group of Seven and Emily Carr), Milne is in many ways the most remarkable of the lot. He may have spent most of his life working in tin shacks in the middle of nowhere, but the best of the work here exudes a feeling of freshness and newness you’d struggle to encounter in work produced today.

Born in rural Ontario in 1882, Milne passed his formative years in New York, developing a bright, fresh post-impressionist style: street scenes with women in big Edwardian hats that make clever use of white to evoke light reflecting from streets and walls.

But it was when he moved to Boston Corners in Upstate New York, that Milne found his feet. Here, he captured a sense of the teeming growth of the American wilderness in paintings on paper that are generally modestly-scaled, but which at their best exude a raw, unmediated engagement with the land.

Images of the artist’s wife reading, her fragmented form merging into patterns of dancing light and shadow, water and leaves, are anchored in their early 20th century moment by the style of her clothes. Elsewhere the immediacy of Milne’s painting seems to leave matters of historical style behind. Looking at his gouache Limestone Rocks, for instance, with its surging patterns of tarry black, muted blue and red; sunlit tree-trunks indicated simply by leaving the paper blank, you’d never imagine this work was done in 1916 – it could just as easily be 1976.

Milne’s use of unadulterated blacks is, indeed, one of his defining characteristics, seen most startlingly in Reflected Forms, 1917, in which shadows cover a lake evoked in flat pitch-black, the branches of the trees standing out as though in negative against the black forest beyond. The black isn’t so much what Milne sees as what he feels: here, the unyielding vastness and indifference of nature – an effect that is at once numbing and oddly transcendent.

Milne’s First World War paintings, meanwhile, are less convincing. Arriving in France in 1919, too late to do any fighting, he set about capturing the devastated battle-fields in a fragmentary, experimental style using broken, vaguely van Gogh-like marks that feel rather bitty, applied to compositions that are in many ways rather conventional.

Indeed, there’s a side to Milne that must have seemed dated even then. This is most apparent in decorative snow-scapes such as Gentle Snowfall, in which the muffling impression of white-on-whiteness is artfully conveyed in subtly differentiated ochres, greys and even oranges. But, delightful as these images are, they lack the sense of primal identification with the landscape seen in his best works, such as Prospect Hole, 1929, one of a series of paintings of flooded mine-shafts, captured in near-psychedelic patterns of black and brilliant reds, in which the deforested landscapes of northern Ontario appear more brutalised than anything he depicted on the Western Front.

The tent among the trees in Tent in Temigami is captured in conventional perspective, though there’s a strangely visionary quality to the forest around it and the swirling patterns on the ground. The sense of slightly sinister isolation brings to mind a far-better known Canadian painter: Peter Doig, who, though born in Scotland, spent his formative childhood and adolescent years in Canada.

Indeed Doig, now 58, acknowledges Milne as an influence. Many of his most famous images, such as White Canoe (1991), which when it sold for $11.3 million in 2007 made him – for a time – the world’s most expensive living artist, convey a similar sense of a wooded wilderness that is apparently deserted, but where every last rock and twig is suffused with meaning.

While the show gives the impression of Milne as a temperamental loner who died tragically young, apparently he was a relatively clubbable sort, who lived until he was 71, producing work in an increasingly whimsical fantasy vein. The exhibition, however, cuts out in 1939, at the end of his classic period, with snow-bound sunsets in which the very clouds seem about to burst with an animistic sculptural presence.

Milne may in the greater scheme of things be a relatively minor artist, but I’d rather have minor art like this, that takes you somewhere you’ve never been and from an intensely personal perspective, than much of the repetitive, conventionally “challenging” work served up as major by larger galleries.